Hashdoc, a social document discovery platform, announced that it closed a $190,000 seed round of investment in December 2012. The round wasled by Silicon Badia and included prominent angel investors from the Middle East and the United States. Hashdoc's platform focuses on delivering high-quality curated collections of documents such as templates, white papers, and presentations for professionals and businesses.
"The idea for Hashdoc came from a frequent frustration I've experienced in my career... Regardless of what role I was playing, I was always searching for documents to help me be more productive... but the problem was that search results were unorganized, unfiltered and full of spam," said Tarek Koudsi, Hashdoc's co-founder and CEO. The platform was founded to change that--and make relevant documents easier to discover, filter and use. "Publishers and document producers waste time and effort reaching their targeted audience, and professionals spend too much time looking for the right document. We want to solve this issue through a platform that does to documents what Quora did to questions and YouTube to videos."
Koudsi adds, "according to 2012 reports from Symantec and the International Data Corporation, US organizations waste around $19,732 per information worker per year dealing with challenges related to working with documents. Teams spend 4,000 hours a year looking for poorly organized electronically stored information while professionals spend 5-15% of their time reading information, but up to 50% looking for it."
Hashdoc was founded in Jordan in 2011 and was incubated at Oasis500, a seed investment accelerator. While the platform is still in alpha testing, and sign-ups are currently invite-only, the documents are free to browse, and Hashdoc boasts a 68% shared-to-downloaded ratio for its growing documents collection.
Silicon Badia, a US and Middle East early stage venture capital fund,led the round with the participation of Oasis500 and Amjad Afanah, an angel investor and product manager at VMware, based out of Silicon Valley. "The ways in which we discover, consume, and share content is being disrupted by new technologies in almost every industry today. Nevertheless, even with all of these new discovery platforms, discovering one of the oldest yet most used forms of content, the document, is still extremely unintuitive. We are excited for Tarek to join our Launchpad program in the US in February, where we will work with Hashdoc to develop technology, business, and partnerships that help in solving this tough problem" said Namek Zu'bi from Silicon Badia.
Having built a strong product base and experimented with different product-market fits, Hashdoc is now focusing on capturing and accelerating user growth and high-grade document acquisition.
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© Press Release 2013
